Tuesday, October 16, 2012

The Dark Sidewalk In Daylight (Still Dark)

Walking at night I look at that dark,
the deeper dark of the dark sidewalk,
and I don’t see monsters in the dark,
I don’t see something else in the dark,
I don’t see someplace else in the dark.
But I do see the deeper darkness.
The darkness is there and in my mind.
If I walked there I would be walking
into the darkness in my mind, too.
The darkness in my mind is deeper
than the darkness of the dark sidewalk,
less empty and somehow more complete.
I do not walk there. I cross the street.

Not too long ago one bright afternoon I saw a hot rod. It wasn’t this one. Everything happened too quickly for me to get out my camera. But I found this photograph at some random site on the internet. The hot rod I saw looked like this one.

The hot rod was driving east on the street next to the patch of sidewalk I’ve called the dark sidewalk. On the sidewalk, walking west, were three young teenage girls, high school age kids.

So I thought: Cool! This is going to be just like a scene from American Graffiti. The driver of the hot rod will slow down and honk his horn at the girls. The girls either will yell and wave, or they’ll pointedly ignore the hot rod, give the driver the cold shoulder until he has driven past, then they’ll stop and turn and look at hot rod and giggle with each other that the driver of such a cool car had slowed down and honked at them.

In fact what happened was: Nothing! The driver of the hot rod didn’t slow down and didn’t honk his horn at the three girls. The three girls never even noticed the hot rod—two girls were on their phones and just kept talking and walking, the third just kept walking and staring straight ahead. Even when the hot rod was behind them the girls never looked over their shoulders.

I thought: Have I died and gone to Hell?

*

I called that area of sidewalk dark because at night tall trees blocked light from nearby streetlights. But this year our suburb’s forester has started cutting down all the ash trees in our suburb because they’ve been infested with emerald ash borer beetles. I mentioned that in, Dead From Golgotha. Already all the trees along that sidewalk have been cleared. Now at night the sidewalk is no different than any other area of sidewalk. It’s not dark at all.

But obviously there’s still something not right there. Even during the day in bright sunlight it's obvious there's still something not right there.